ABAI Center Of Excellence based in Karnataka is one of the first initiatives by the government to push the industry further through multiple facilities like workshops, finishing school, incubator center, green screen room, photogrammetry, NCAM and other latest technologies, bringing together the creative community under one roof.
Hosted by ABAI president, CII National Committee on Media & Entertainment vice-chairman and Technicolor India country head Biren Ghose, the evening session saw the chieftains of the organisation which included ABAI – Center of Excellence founder CEO and Animaple Solutions director Shiji Sunil, Scan 360 Studios technology guru & partner Hans Martin Van der Sluys, and ABAI – Center of Excellence secretary B S Srinivas.
“We have aligned with a lot of universities and our courses are a part of university courses too. It is a take-off as with some marketing and outreach, we will be there. The most important part of COE is the finishing school where we train a talented set of students in technology and production since we have aligned ourselves with Unity and Unreal and we have all the technology partnerships and certified programs,” shared Sunil, enlisting the number of programs and technologies that adorn the facility.
Ghose shared that the AVGC sector is actually an infrastructure sector since it requires a robust infrastructure that need not be replicated by every entrepreneur and start-up. “The whole idea of COE was to take an area which might be necessarily viable for others; for example: motion capture can’t be used by the studio every single day by gaming companies,“ he added, explaining why the government’s intervention in this area can ease the workflow and maintain quality.
“I think what we need to do is to introduce the community at large to Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, and Trivandrum to begin to look outside their own studios,” Sluys shared, explaining how the west is already past the phase where producers or actors operated out of their own facilities.
Srinivas informed that they have a major lineup of tie-ups with clients; almost close to 10 tie-ups already. “We recently completed a project using the facilities which we can not reveal at this point of time. Southern film industries are going to visit us in a few days. In esports mode, production, and post-production model, there is something exciting coming up so I think 2021 will be an exciting year. People from all over the world will come to Karnataka to get their projects done. We have a dedicated team and I feel we always talk about technology but we have very good technicians with us today,” he shared.
Government of Karnataka Department of Electronics IT, BT, and S&T additional chief secretary Dr EV Ramana Reddy informed that Karnatka ranked as the top performer in the start up sector in the last two years and as mentioned they had two policies already in the years 2012 and 2017. He shared, “Not just in the AVGC sector but in general if you see in the innovation ecosystem, out of 40 unicorns which are there in the country, half of them are in Bangalore and definitely the ecosystem will help us in taking us to the next level.”
Extending his support, he concluded, “We will definitely support this sector and we want this sector to achieve what IT has achieved in the past 20 years. In the next 10 years we will see the biggest boon in the AVGC sector.”